30 Sep 2011

2011? Jesus, how did you arrive here - on your dinosaur? Click here to go to hencewise.com, and stop a weirdo holding a candle in the dark, looking all dramatic and old-fashioned.

Humans absolutely love having children. That's not just my opinion, you can see it on charts. Some scientists even believe that the world's population is now so explosive and dangerously unsustainable that by 2050, the Earth will begin to tilt off its axis and float away from the Sun. That's not true, obviously, that's just a bit of fun. The actual reasons we're fucked are a lot more real and bleak and terrifying, but I don't want to upset any one in the meantime so instead I've compiled a happy little list of the Top 10 reasons why maybe not having so many kids could be good as well, yeah?

Top 10 Reasons to Maybe Not Have Kids

Children will ask you questions all the time as soon as they can yap their stupid little heads into familiar bloody sounds, and you’ll have to answer them all, try to, or at least lie to them. If honesty is a characteristic you cherish, and it probably should be, then you’ll very quickly find yourself having these regularly annoying and annoyingly regular conversations where you realise you can’t really explain why you’re wearing a tie, or why bedtime is at 9, or why you’re hugging one animal whilst eating another in a bap, or why you told mummy she 'looks pretty' even though she woke up like Picasso had smashed his minivan into a Fat Club picnic. You’ll have to try and explain these things, of course, and they’ll keep asking why, why, why, daddy, why, mummy, why, why, why, and then somewhere down that line of questioning you’ll realise that you have no idea why you’re saying what you're saying at all. You’ll realise there is no sensible reason that you wear a tie, or why bedtime is at 9, or why you do almost anything in life. Then maybe you’ll take the easy route, lie and tell them that Santa Claus wont love them if they don’t be quiet, right now, for the tooth bunny in Heaven so you can have a little bit of quiet time alone to put wine and sausages in to your head.

What if it doesn’t like being alive? That’ll be your fault, wont it, and they’ll definitely tell you with all the indignant whining of a prick with a dropped popsicle. You’ll get “I wish I’d never been born!” screamed at you every time you pause their MegaKillerStabbyGun game for two minutes, or make them eat a fragment of vegetable with their oven-melted chicken glow-sticks. Once they’re born, they’ll have to deal with all the confusion involved in being alive, stuck on a track now that’s hard to get off, and heading always towards that sticky and uncertain end. Maybe that little life is happy wherever it is in yours or someone else’s bollocks, and it shouldn’t be yanked into an increasingly busy and complicated world so you can have something to look at instead of your increasing dull life – maybe it’s swimming around somewhere, just fine, living a lovely little sperm life where you're not making choices for it at all.

You can’t drink with children. Well, you can, obviously, but they wont be very good at it. And they’ll probably grow up deformed and lumpy in all the wrong ways, and making bleugh-bloops-gurh-gurh noises instead of words until they're 29. Not only that, but it also becomes a lot harder to drink with parents, too, because they're now indefinitely more busy with wee, poo, snot, dribble, ear goo, and sick. Meanwhile, however, if you don’t have kids you can still be that smug arsehole who asks their mummy-and-daddy friends about how their Saturday morning swimming lesson was, all the way waiting impatiently to completely story-top that boring shit by replying that your weekend binge-eating LSD-laced doughnuts off young strippers’ bodies was “alright” as well.

What if you have a child and it just turns out to be rubbish? Imagine if you raised David Cameron, how absolutely fucking disappointed you’d be. You’re not allowed to put it in a big sock and hit it on the mantelpiece, of course, that’s illegal, so you’ll just have to keep cooking for it and buying it trousers as it gets taller and taller and louder and louder, until it’s just spitting, boozing and lolloping around your neighbourhood looking enough like you that it might as well be a big neon sign on your house that says, ‘WE'RE SHIT.’

On the other hand, blimey, what if it grows up and it’s just fucking brilliant? That’s even worse! Then you’ll have to worry about the thing constantly, as it inevitably runs around aiming itself at nails and blunt objects with all the co-ordination of a camel that’s had its bones replaced with butterbeans. And if it survives all that childhood giddiness, and nowadays it probably bloody will, that’s only the start of the never-ending nightmare of unconditionally loving someone. You’ll then have to worry about bullies, and perverts-in-vans, and if they're learning to spell quick enough; then they’ll get older still and you’ll have to worry about drugs, and STDs, and their precious, stupid hearts; then they’ll get even older, and you’ll still have to worry about their jobs, and their balding, and the ever-sneaking suspicion that their fated life partner is probably just some smiling, cheating demon who’s waiting to cripple them emotionally and steal half their plastic.

You haven’t always got to do what your naturally-selected instincts tell you to. You already have to pander to your biology every time you’re hungry or thirsty or tired or threatened or horny, all of which are hormone-induced feelings evolved to keep you alive and fucking. From an evolutionary perspective, it is hard-wired into us to fancy each other’s firm or curvy bodies, and then to try and plug our genitals into each others -- an impulse Nature uses to convert those hormones into more humans. None of us know why we do these things because there is no reason. No reason at all outside the unexplained-but-desired perpetual survival of our species. We already have to die as a necessary sacrifice to our collective gene pool, so why not keep screwing Mother Nature with a condom until she's quite ready to explain why exactly you shouldn't.

The World, as you'll know if you've ever been there, is already over-populated. Look around you, we’re bloody everywhere. Snow, deserts, volcanoes, space, Swindon, there’s literally nowhere shit enough that we won’t put bricks around us and sit there until we die. We’ll basically settle anywhere; in any grey, lifeless, bog of a hole, and yes, I know Swindon’s got a pool club. Humans move about, and spread into all the gaps, grinding the environments around them into stuff to make their lives more comfortable, and then continue multiplying like the virus-holding-sticks that they are. If everyone keeps having kids, they’ll literally be walking around banging into each other all day, with nowhere to live and nothing to eat, until we can finally invent a big, expensive NASA cannon and start shooting them optimistically in the direction of Mars.

And what about that Global Warming thing that everybody and their squirrel is radically altering their lives for? If you’re somewhat environmentally-conscious, or a hippy-ish kind of person who loves a bit of tree, or even one of these annoying new breed of people who masturbate over the idea that the human race should, for some clumsy reason, survive, survive more, and continue surviving, then you’re the last person that should be having a load of kids, unless your plan is to literally bundle them all into the walls like a horrific meaty insulation paste. You can cycle all you want to the airport, and compost your toenails, and wash an oil-covered crab, and put your 6 Blu-Ray players on standby while you separate your thick paper from your thin card, but if you choose to have a child your carbon footprint is still going to be the size of an Electric Elephant's. Our own methane emissions, our ridiculously lavish food demands, our burn-all-the-things energy and transport systems, and our childish desires to have every brand-new shiny iPhone 76 and the latest strip-screen, 4D nuclear-satellite television, means the act of having a child now is basically the same as popping out a smelly, smiley pollution factory. If you’re gonna do that, you might as well drive to Australia in an asbestos tank towing a caravan of large rare mammals and set fire to all your batteries in an igloo.

If you do get old (and there are at least 23 reasons why that might be OK too), and you do suddenly find yourself looking in every direction at an orchestra of happy parents around you while you’re lying swastika-shaped in a hot tub eating cheesecake from a cup and decadently farting, you might well be pray to a nagging, silly thought that somewhere in your Free and Farty little life you made the wrong decision, and now you’re missing out on something. By this point, you’re very likely to be staring at your misshapen and useless genitals, haggard and lonely, and weeping a single tear into your bath or mug of cake. But then, hopefully just before you reach for the toaster, you’ll remember... ADOPTION! That’s right, other people’s kids! While almost every other sheep-like, caring cretin in the world is holding hands and crossing roads with their accidental DNA-smashed-in-a bag offspring, you’ll be able to choose yours! What do you want? A fat one, a thin one, black, white, too many legs, not enough arms? They’re all there! Or you could just do what celebrities do now, and fly out to some entirely devastated African country-or-other with your publicist and a photographer, and bring back a few handfuls of your favourites in a sack.

Let's face it, all your bloody friends are going to have kids, anyway, and they’ll probably be more than happy to share. Who needs your own, when you can have a whole range of bonkers little things that you can parent a bit on a Sunday but then give back when the football’s on? You can even be that ‘Cool Uncle’ character entirely absent from Irish Catholic stereotypes, and teach them mischievous things like punching and swearwords, but then not have to deal with the boring consequences at things like Parents Evenings and Court. In fact, if you absolutely adore children, that’s one of the best reasons to never have your own. Just remember that bit of advice that’s famous for being entirely fucking creepy when used in the context of kids: Why read a book when you can join a library?

2011? Jesus, how did you arrive here - on your dinosaur? Click here to go to hencewise.com, and stop a weirdo holding a candle in the dark, looking all dramatic and old-fashioned.